After biographer Alexander Masters was given a pile of discarded diaries, he began piecing together a life
One breezy afternoon in 2001, two friends of mine, Richard and Dido, were mooching around a building site in Cambridge when they came across a battered yellow skip. Inside were 148 handwritten notebooks. Some were crammed into an old bottle box that had jaunty green print on the side: “Ribena! 5d!” Most were scattered across the bricks exultantly. A few had royal emblems from George VI’s time. Others were bright, bubblegum colours, tangerine and mushy-pea green. A chalky jotter that Dido picked up broke like chocolate. Inside, the rotted pages were filled with urgent handwriting. Running up one of the margins were the words, “Hope my diaries aren’t blown up before people can read them – they have immortal value.” There was no name or return address on the books. The diarist was simply “I” who had lived, and then died, and been pitched in a skip.
What could my friends do? They couldn’t take them to the police: they would laugh. They couldn’t leave them in the skip: that would be criminal. I’m a biographer, so Dido dumped them on my doorstep. Why not, she said, write about an anonymous diarist found in a skip? It would be the first ever biography in which the biographer hasn’t a clue who his subject is. Dido had left the books in three boxes, one of which had a label on the side addressed to the librarian, Trinity College, Cambridge.
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